Tania Leon

Cuban-born composer and conductor Tania León is renowned in both capacities for music that is multicultural and polystylistic. She won the Pulitzer Prize for Music for her orchestral work Stride in 2021. León was born on May 14, 1943, in Havana, Cuba, into a multicultural family that included Chinese ancestors. Her grandmother noticed her reactions to music on the radio and bought her a toy piano; she began piano lessons at age four. León earned a B.A. degree at Cuba's Carlos Alfredo Peyrellade Conservatory and went on to the Alejandro García Caturla Conservatory, studying piano with Zenaida Manfugás. In 1967, she took one of the so-called Freedom Flights from Cuba to the U.S., settling later that year in New York. León continued her education at New York University, studying composition with Ursula Mamlok and earning bachelor's and master's degrees. She also studied conducting with Laszlo Halasz and took courses at the Tanglewood Festival with Leonard Bernstein and Seiji Ozawa. In 1969, she became, at the invitation of founder Arthur Mitchell, a co-founder of the Dance Theater of Harlem and established its music department, school, and orchestra. She wrote several ballets for the group. León also developed her conducting career, establishing the Community Concert Series of the Brooklyn Philharmonic in 1978. She has appeared as guest conductor with many prestigious ensembles, including the New York Philharmonic (where she served under conductor Kurt Masur as New Music Advisor from 1993 to 1997), the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, and the Orchestra dell'Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia in Rome. She was also Latin American Music Advisor to the American Composers Orchestra, which premiered her orchestral work Desde... in 2001. Commissions for León's compositions came from Europe as well as the U.S. Her orchestral work Horizons was premiered by the NDR Symphony Orchestra of Hamburg and was later performed at Tanglewood. León's opera Scourge of Hyacinths has been performed more than 20 times in Germany, Switzerland, France, and Mexico. The New York Philharmonic premiered her orchestral work Stride in 2019; the work won the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 2020, and the following year, León was given the Kennedy Center Honors. León's works include chamber music, orchestral works, vocal and solo piano pieces, and Alegre for concert band (2003). Some 40 of her compositions had been recorded by the early 2020s, at which time she remained quite active. León has taught at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center in New York and was a visiting professor at Harvard, Yale, and Musikschule Hamburg.
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